Fallout creations?   08 April 2011

It happened 21 years ago. Suddenly, out of the culture of the Southasian diaspora, there emerged a wave of religion, art, and politics, spilling out with a discordant force that culminated in the behemoth known as Salman Rushdie. At the time, great hope was riding on The Satanic Verses, for which the author had received an unheard-of advance at that time – USD 850,000 from Penguin. Rushdie was optimistic: this would be the novel that would lodge him firmly in the annals of literary greatness and, possibly, make him the most important British novelist of his times. These hopes aside, the work certainly cemented him as one of the era’s most controversial, and most discussed, authors. What he described as an attempt ‘to write about religion and revelation from the point of view of a secular person’ was taken as a vicious attack on Islam. Muslims staged a book-burning in Bradford -- which would inspire Hanif Kureshi to write The Black Album in 1995 -- and Ayatollah Khomeini issued on fatwa on Rushdie. ‘I inform all zealous Muslims of the world,’ Khomeini proclaimed on 14 February 1989, ‘that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses … and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its contents, are sentenced to death.’

Boom. With Rushdie’s work, the very fibre of British culture and society was transformed – and, along with it, the larger relationship among the Southasian diaspora itself. Never before had a work by an artist of Southasian origin exploded at a global level in this manner. Neither, it should be noted, has it since. This is not to say that Rushdie had been working in a vacuum. Kureishi himself, born in Bromley, Kent, to a Pakistani father and English mother, had already written the screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), which was rather incendiary in its own right, taking as its subject matter a gay Pakistani-British boy growing up in 1980s London. His 1990 novel, Buddha of Suburbia, was likewise a revelation to many, liberating them from the burden of their collective identity crisis. It was published the year following Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa, and won the Whitbread Award for best first novel.

During the subsequent decade, Rushdie would live like a fugitive, leaving veritable mayhem in his wake. In July 1991, Hitoshi Igarashi, a Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses, and an Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo, were stabbed to death in separate incidents. In 1993, Rushdie’s Norway  publisher, William Nygaard was shot near his house. The same year, in Turkey, 37 people died in anti-Rushdie riots targeted against the Turkish translator of the book.

The Asian Women Writers Collective, formed by a seminal group of pioneers with prominent Southasian members, published a statement in response to the fatwa. In it, they condemned ‘the political manipulation of The Satanic Verses by all sides’, and pointed out that the controversy had been ‘used to divide Black communities in Britain and to encourage and inflame racism’. This was a generation that did not think of itself as Muslim or Hindu or Sikh, or even as ‘Asian’ (despite the collective being named as ‘Asian’), but rather as ‘black’. ‘Culture,’ they said, ‘is not a static entity but something that we are continuously in the process of remaking and on our own terms – as women and as black people.’

Race and ‘binglish’
Jatinder Verma, a playwright and theatre director who felt deeply affected by race issues in the UK, decided to fight back by setting up the first anti-colonialtheatre group in the country. ‘Everywhere my friends and I looked, it seemed black people, as we identified ourselves, were victims of white oppression,’ he recalls. ‘I wanted to line up all whites and [shoot] them. Instead, I set up a theatre company, Tara Arts, with four friends who felt the same way, and who were migrants like me – from Kenya, India and Australia.’

Among other pieces, between 1979 and 1984, Verma wrote several seminal plays. These included Yes, Memsahib, the story of the formation of modern East Africa by colonial Indian ‘coolie’ labour; Inkalaab 1919, a postcolonial reworking of historical events on the Subcontinent; Vilayat (England, Your England), about an ambitious Southasian man who ‘pays a price for his overt love for all things British’; and Chilli in Your Eyes, about young Indians growing up in contemporary Britain. From 1984, he started to mix Western classics with Indian theatrical tradition, developing a ‘unique hybrid performance methodology, “Binglish”’.

By the early 1990s, these works had led the company to the heart of the British theatre establishment, performing at the National Theatre with adaptations of classics such as Tartuffe and Cyrano transposed to a Southasian setting. In so doing, a new paradigm was born that was to re-emerge in different strains throughout the next decades – for instance, in the form of Gurinder Chadha’s popular film Bride and Prejudice or the poetry of Daljit Nagra, both of which use a kind of ‘Binglish’.

While some diaspora artists used Binglish as a new, hybrid form of expression to engage with issues, others went the old ‘British way’, employing comedy and satire to poke fun at themselves. With many discovering that a desire to laugh at themselves was perhaps the quickest route to acceptance, the emergence of Southasian comedy was a specific function of the diaspora’s attempt at integrating. For instance, the show Goodness Gracious Me, which started on radio from 1996, found its way into the popular imagination via television from 1998 until 2001. The show not only parodied Southasian speech patterns and ways of life, but also the conflict between Southasian culture and British life. The actors Nina Wadia and Meera Syal became famous because of this show.

In the midst of this period, in 1999, Ayub Khan-Din’s landmark film East Is East came out. It was set in a British household of mixed ethnicity, with a Pakistani father and an English mother in Salford, near Manchester, in 1971. Jahangir, who also went as ‘George’, was played by Om Puri, whose phenomenal characterisation portrayed an overbearing Pakistani father who expects his family to follow his strict traditional ways. Viewers particularly see the conflict for the children, who for all intents and purposes were British, as they are constantly reminded of their ‘Pakiness’, both outside and inside their home, by their father’s presence.

Khan-Din’s writing created a compelling, incisive, yet endearing portrait of the life of an immigrant family in the UK, and guaranteed a place to East Is East in the popular, diasporic imagination. Indeed, the film’s sequel, West Is West, premiered in London in October 2010 to three days of sold-out performances. West Is West employs many of the same techniques as the original, but watching it makes one realise how much the diaspora has moved on. It is difficult to laugh at the same clichéd portrayals from the 1970s – jokes about ‘camels’, the accents, and the fact that all Southasians seem to be related. For this writer, watching the film was a bittersweet experience: a trip down memory lane, but revisiting a world that no longer really exists. Southasian men now languish in prisons and detention camps without trial, for instance, while a tradition of censorship seems to have been put in place since the days of the fatwa for anyone who offends Islam.

Fear of free speech
In 2009, when the National Theatre staged a dramatic rendering of The Black Album to commemorate 20 years since the fatwa against Salman Rushdie – and, in the eyes of many, against free speech in general – its subject matter had again become particularly pertinent in the era following the attacks of 11 September 2001. Publishers, promoters and producers worldwide seem to have grown more wary. In 2008, for example, Random House, a major American publisher, halted production on a novel after having already paid a massive sum, due to fears of another Rushdie-esque nightmare. The book, The Jewel of Medina, by journalist Sherry Jones, was to be a historical but racy account of Aisha, Prophet Muhammad’s youngest wife. When the book was sent out for endorsements, Denise Spellberg, an associate professor of Islamic history at the University of Texas, deemed the book ‘offensive’. (Eventually the book was released both in the US and internationally, though not by Random House.)

In his essay ‘How the West was lost to free speech’, Kenan Malik, an India-born British writer, cites a number of examples of theatres and directors making compromises in order to avoid controversy in the post-9/11 situation. In 2007, for instance, the long-established Royal Court Theatre cancelled an adaptation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, because it was set in Islamic heaven. The Barbican, another theatre at the heart of London’s cultural life, likewise omitted major components from a production of Tamburlaine the Great out of fear of causing offence to the Muslim community. And in 2006, in Berlin, the Deutsche Opera decided to cancel a production of Mozart’sIdomeneo, rather than include a depiction of Prophet Mohammad.

This is also the mindset within which the cultural landscape of the Southasian diaspora today operates. It hardly seems a likely breeding ground for renegade writers and artists, such as Rushdie, that the UK once was. That hope that something dangerous, volatile and incendiary might emerge has withered with the heat from real bombings. What is now produced is an entire genre that can be termed ‘fallout creations’, meaning that they are part of the socio-political fallout of 9/11 and the follow-up attacks of 7 July 2005 on the London subway. Works such as Victoria Brittain’s Waiting, which played this year to packed audiences, belongs to the post 9-11 world, consisting of the stories almost verbatim, re-told with depth and emotions of five women who are the wives of Southasian men picked up one day on charges of terrorism and who never came back. 

~ Sascha Akhtar is a columnist, reviewer and author who lives in London.

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites